Semiconscious States: The Political and the Psychic in Urban Public Life

Imagine a public square in the center of a metropolis crowded with hundreds of policemen, in identical uniforms, chanting slogans to demand more “rights” from “the state” to use their authority over “the people.” Imagine this taking place in Taksim Square, Istanbul, a site often selected for public demonstrations in critique of the state. Taksim Square— emblematic site in urban public consciousness for the enactment, production, and regeneration of the political—was built around the memorial monument for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular/modernist founder of modern Turkey. Imagine a group of mothers and a father throwing themselves in front of the rushing cars in Taksim Square traffic, or another group sitting on the main street and waving their banners at hurried drivers blowing their horns. Picture the banners reading “Our children are dying on hunger strikes in prison.” Envision, then, pedestrians passing by, cursing and spitting at the demonstrating parents. Imagine hundreds of people gathering to watch what is happening, and doing nothing: a public voyeurism. Visualize a young man emerging from the crowd, his face red and his fists clenched, in an attempt to attack the parents demonstrating for their children. Imagine, then, the police approaching to force the parents out of the traffic and to threaten them with arrest. Picture, too, journalists running about, cameras clicking, their flashes encircling the incidents. Figure the stories produced by street dwellers and their rumor, as well as the TV news coverage of the latest events in the city center. Think about millions of people watching TV, reproducing and magnifying the political as framed by the journalists. The public square, so imagined by social theorists as symbol par excellence for the public sphere or for civil society, is a site, here, for the production of the political. If it pretends to be a domain for rationalized communication and disagreement (Habermas 1989) or if it is idealized and represented as such in public discourses, the public square is interrupted with multiple interventions by representatives of the state. But who, what, and where is “the state” in the incidents just described? Here the police claim to be more “stately” than the state and demonstrate against it. There © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.